The Butcher’s Finger
I recently read On the Sufferings of the World, a philosophically pessimistic essay by Arthur Schopenhauer — the great German pessimist whose influence stretched all the way to Friedrich Nietzsche. Continue Reading
God the Producer; Divinisation of Creation
There is a familiar claim in religion: God created the world. It is presented as a statement about reality, a metaphysical fact about the origin of things. But in The Continue Reading
God is Man’s Mirror: Feuerbach and the Projection of Human Nature
There is a long-standing assumption at the heart of religion: that man is the creation, and God the creator. Lo and behold, man was poofed into existence, taking on the Continue Reading
The Understanding: Why It Matters for Freedom and Independence
I’ve been reading Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity since Christmas last year. It’s not a light read, but it’s one of those books that rewards patience — the kind Continue Reading
My response to Brain Cox on meaning
I recently watched this Joe Rogan episode featuring British physicist Brian Cox, here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc7OHXJtWco&t=1012s Somewhere amid the cosmology and particle-physics digressions, the conversation drifted toward meaning. Cox Continue Reading
Company gone away in the world already
“How many in whose company I came into the world are gone away already!” — Meditations, book 6, 56. I can imagine Marcus Aurelius writing these words while encamped Continue Reading
Apranihita: The Radical Philosophy of Aimlessness in an Age of Consumerism
Apranihita is a Sanskrit term meaning “wishlessness”, “aimlessness”, or “freedom from striving”. In Buddhist thought, it refers to a deep letting go—the abandonment of chasing, grasping, or needing things to Continue Reading
The Fire of Becoming: Heraclitus, Judge Holden, and the Eternal Strife of the World
“Thus the world is not to be identified with any particular substance, but rather with an ongoing process governed by a law of change.” — Heraclitus (source) This Continue Reading
Cultural Hegemony in Action
I’ve spent a good deal of time digesting Antonio Gramsci’s writings this year, the Italian marxist famous for his writing his Prison Notebooks while locked up in Mussolini’s prison. Areas Continue Reading
No Soul, No Problem: Feuerbach and the Myth of Mind–Body Dualism
The dualism of mind and body—the belief that we possess an incorporeal essence, a soul that is truly “us,” and that the body is merely a vessel or flesh-puppet animated Continue Reading
S***’s Creek Without Marxist Dialectics: A brief history of Britain
Introduction I’ve been working on this article for some time now, here and there dipping into Historical materialism, the primary Marxist methodology to studying not just history, but the approach Continue Reading
What is hyperreality and why it matters
Has the thought ever crossed your mind that life feels increasingly artificial, as if everything around us is more curated than real? In an age dominated by screens, media, and Continue Reading
The Immortality Illusion
Our focus is fame’s ancient precursor: kleos! And I’d like to explore it in some depth so I can set the tone of this article. Kleos is an ancient Greek Continue Reading
The Illusion of Suffering
If we could sum up the essence of this article in one overarching sentiment, it would be captured by this quote from our favourite Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius: “Whatever the Continue Reading
The Great Economic Chain
The Great Chain of Being was once a dominant concept that provided a vertically ranked hierarchical structure to the universe, with God at the top, followed by angels, humans, Continue Reading
The Doctrine of Flux
Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Ephesus, in what is now Turkey, around 535-475 BCE. At Standupphilosophers, we embrace his doctrine of flux: Heraclitus believed that everything Continue Reading
The Fragility of Potential: Reflections on Nietzsche’s Acorn
In Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphoristic brilliance, we find a profound meditation on potential and its precarious nature: ‘The most wretched little animal can prevent the mightiest oak tree from coming into Continue Reading
Stoicism vs the Crowd
Recently I’ve been revisiting Seneca’s Moral Epistles which are a letter collection of 124 letters addressed to his friend Lucilius. Among these letters, Letter VII, better known as ‘On Crowds’ has caught my Continue Reading